Radio and cinema had one novelty in common: they were forms of communication which dispensed with the written word. The written word had gone hand in hand with civilization from the beginning. Now, theoretically, an illiterate could be as well-informed about the world as the best-read man. Reading might have been expected to decline as a result, but this did not happen. Perhaps the habit was too inbred. Besides, primary education, now almost universal in Europe, made literacy also universal, which had greatly increased their circulation during the First World War, continued to do so after it. In Great Britain, which carried the process furthest, the press by 1930 ranked twelfth among British industries, ahead of shipbuilding. Newspapers now counted their readers by millions where they had previously counted their readers by thousands. They had bigger headlines, shorter paragraphs, simpler writing. They derived their incomes mainly from advertisements, not from the halfpennies or pennies paid by readers . The decisive figure was the proprietor — Northcliffe and Beaverbrook in Great Britain, Hugenberg in Germany— not the editor. Nearly all the great newspapers were conservative in character, and often conservative in allegiance. They were among the most materialistic elements in a materialistic age. Nevertheless , they provided more news than had been provided by even the most esteemed newspaper of a staider past. The newspapers, like the cinema and usually the radio, expressed popular culture, and observers talked as though this were the only culture which now existed. The flood of the message was supposed to have submerged the standards of previous times, but this was far from being the case. There was also a middle culture and a high culture — the distinctions between them resting on levels of sophistication (middlebrow and highbrow), not on class. The middlebrow culture was the least interesting, a repetition of past patterns interspersed with lamentations against anything new, either above or below. Those who condemned James Joyce or Picasso also disapproved of the cinema. These middlebrows felt more menaced than before, hence the intolerance which contrasted oddly with their professions of liberalism. Original artists and thinkers were constantly, though ineffectually, harassed. The works of three great British writers — Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence — came under the legal ban of pornography. The organizer of an art exhibition learned to expect, in England, a visit from the police. In Paris and Berlin he took precautions against riot.